I nodded again, feeling like a child who’d been sent outside to play.
We ran out of words after that. She closed her eyes and let her head rest against the pillow, but didn’t let go of my hand.
Hours passed, I didn’t know how many, I just sat there watching her sleep. Sometimes checking my phone or scrolling the news, but mostly just sitting vigil.
Eventually, the afternoon sunlight came in through the window, striping the bed with gold. I remembered sitting in this room as a kid, waiting for her to finish making dinner, or listening to her hum along with the commercial jingles while I watched cartoons.
She drifted in and out of sleep, her breathing slow and shallow. I sat there, counting each rise and fall of her chest, listening to the creaks and groans of the house as it settled into another day of doing nothing.
I looked around at the machines and monitors, at the endless loop of blue sky out the window, and I wondered what it meant to keep a promise to someone who might not be around tomorrow.
I wondered if I’d ever learn how to do it right.
The clock ticked on, loud in the quiet, and I held her hand until it twitched and her eyes opened again.
“You aint got nothing better to do than sit around here staring at an old woman all day?”
I chuckled, but it was strained, even to my own ears. I looked at the empty recliner in the corner, the old green one my father used to park himself in after dinner. He would sit for hours, never saying a word, just drinking cheap whiskey and watching the news with the volume all the way down. Sometimes I wondered if he was actually listening for something, or if the silence was what he wanted.
The recliner looked smaller now, or maybe I was just bigger.
“He misses you,” she said, reading my mind.
I stared at the floor. “I doubt it.”
“He does. He just—he doesn’t know how to be soft.”
“Doesn’t have to be,” I said, a little harder than I meant. “I’m not twelve anymore.”
She reached for my hand, missed, then tried again. I took her fingers in mine, careful not to squeeze too hard.
“He’s scared,” she said. “Always has been.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I let it hang between us, like a bad smell no one wanted to name. She’d always made excuses for him and this was no different. But there was no use arguing about it.
We sat for a long time. I traced the lines of her hand with my thumb. The TV flickered, casting weird shadows on the far wall.
“He hasn’t come inside all day. Who takes care of you?”
“Oh I got a nurse who comes most days. There’ll be someone here round the clock when . . . when it’s almost time.”
Almost time for her to die.
“Well can I help? What do you need, you thirsty? Hungry?”
“I could use some water now come to think of it.”
I leaned down to kiss her hand and stood. “I’ll be right back.”
The kitchen itself looked smaller than I remembered, but that might’ve just been me. My head nearly brushed the cheap faux-wood cabinets. Someone’d tried to update the place with a new microwave, but it looked out of place, like a spaceship parked on top of an abandoned house. The far end of the kitchen was dominated by stacks of junk mail and a yellow legal pad with my dad’s scratchy handwriting. Mostly numbers: gallons, pounds, acreages, sums that probably made no sense to anyone but him.
I grabbed a glass from the draining rack, filled it with tap water, and watched the bubbles spin up from the bottom. My mother had always hated the taste of the well water. She used to fix it with a splash of lemon, but I found nothing like that in the fridge. A half-empty pack of straws sat next to the dish rack, so I grabbed one and dropped it in the glass.
Back in the living room, she was dozing so I set the water on the side table, then tucked the blanket higher up on her shoulders.
Her eyes opened, and for a second, I could almost see the old fierceness there—the same look she’d give me when I tried to sneak out of chores in the summer. “You take care of yourself out there in that house, you hear?” she said, like she was reading my mind. “I don’t want you moping around. Find something good.”
“I’m trying, Ma.”
